WarSclerotic

Let’s talk facts.
Fact No. 1: The person dismantling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not being broken up by the threats of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, nor by pressure from Interior Minister Eli Yishai. Nor is fear of Shaul Mofaz or Shelly Yacimovich behind the Knesset’s dissolution.

Netanyahu tried to break up his government before Passover so that the election could be held before the summer. The government proved to be too strong, so he had to wait until the Knesset reconvened. The prime minister himself is behind the process that aims to return us to the polling stations in September.

Fact No. 2: Netanyahu is not breaking up his government for political reasons. His political standing is strong. Nor does he want elections for socioeconomic reasons. Although demonstrations are expected in the summer and an economic slowdown is expected in the fall, the the Israeli public still sees the prime minister as being highly skilled in the socioeconomic sphere.

The reason Netanyahu is himself dismantling his strong and stable government is external: the upcoming U.S. election. The prime minister of Israel is determined to get to the Israeli election booth before the president of the United States gets to the American election booth in November.

Fact No. 3: The first reason Netanyahu wants to beat U.S. President Barack Obama to the polls is personal survival. It was U.S. President George H.W. Bush who replaced Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992. And it was U.S. President Bill Clinton who replaced Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his first term, with Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1999. Both instances of a right-wing government being replaced by a left-wing one were inspired by U.S. presidents who were fed up with the Likud government in power.

Obama loathes Netanyahu even more than Bush loathed Shamir or than Clinton loathed Netanyahu. If Obama wins in November, he will immediately crush the Israeli prime minister who dared to defy him. As a result, by December the right-wing government might already be feeling the pain. That’s why Netanyahu wants to hold the election toward the end of the summer.

Fact No. 4: The other reason Netanyahu wants to beat Obama to the polls is national survival. The prime minister is determined to strike Iran, and judges that he will only be able to do so before the U.S. election in November. He wants to make sure he has some wiggle room after the Israeli election and before the American election.

During this interim the new Israeli government will have absolute authority, while the U.S. administration will be impotent. By bringing the election forward Netanyahu is defining the ideal time to attack Iran: September or October.

The ramifications of these four facts, taken together, are clear. The turbulent political season that will begin in Israel next week indicates not that the threat of a confrontation with Iran has passed, but rather that it has grown.

Slowly but surely, without anyone noticing, Netanyahu is working to advance a well-organized action plan, according to a strict timeable, that will bring the strategic crisis to boiling point before next winter. He is operating decisively within both the Israeli and the American political systems in order to reach his goal. So far he is getting what he wants, fashioning the chessboard to his liking. He is bringing to life the scenario of elections (in Israel ), war (in Iran ) and elections (in the United States ).

The timetable is insane. But so are the situation, the challenge and the political system. There is an intolerable gap between the national leadership and the public.

Netanyahu is playing three-dimensional chess on a rickety board, without public support. That means the election campaign will not be only about economic and social issues. It must address the issue of Iran and it must become a referendum on Iran. That is the only way to guarantee that the decision on Iran, whatever it may be, will be made by the nation and not by one person

The “fog of war” is a concept derived from the writings of Carl von Clausewitz, the great 19th century Prussian military theorist who recognized that those leading troops into battle often lack data, perspective and situational awareness. Enveloped within this fog of uncertainty, they may not know whether they are winning or losing, and they may take actions that weaken their position and strengthen their enemies.

Would Clausewitz not be fascinated by the war dominating the 21st century, a conflict so murky we can’t even agree on its name? It is the War on Terrorism or the Long War or the War Against al-Qaida or just Overseas Contingency Operations?

Over at Foggy Bottom — an apt nickname if ever there was one — an unnamed “senior State Department official” told the National Journal’s Michael Hirsh that “the War on Terror is over.” He (or she?) elaborated: “Now that we have killed most of al-Qaida … people who once might have gone into al-Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.” A White House spokesman later issued a clarification, explaining that: “We absolutely have never said our war against al-Qaida is over. We are prosecuting that war at an unprecedented pace.”

Both statements miss if not the elephant in the room, the guerrillas in the mist. Yes, Osama bin Laden sleeps with the fishes and many of his lieutenants have learned the hard way how accurate American-made unmanned aerial vehicles can be. But as Rand Corp. scholar Seth Jones recently noted, with “a handful of regimes teetering from the Arab Spring, al-Qaida is pushing into the vacuum and riding a resurgent wave as its affiliates engage in a violent campaign of attacks across the Middle East and North Africa. … al-Qaida is regrouping.”

Nor have we defeated al-Qaida’s many affiliates and allies, among them: the Taliban, the Haqqani network, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Hezbollah and Hamas.

And, most significantly, there is Iran, which the State Department itself has for years designated as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. Iran’s rulers do not think their war against “the world of arrogance” is over. And they have standing on this issue.

As for “legitimate Islamism,” that is meant to imply the Muslim Brotherhood whose members may indeed believe that elections are preferable to violence as a path to power. But if the Brothers differ from the jihadis over means, they sing from the same hymnal when it comes to ends. Both believe in Islamic supremacy; both are committed to the establishment of Islamic hegemony over the Middle East and, eventually, well beyond; both seek the power to silence critics at home and abroad; both are engaged in persecuting religious minorities in “Muslim lands”; both are committed to the destruction of Israel, the only Middle Eastern nation not ruled by Muslims.

And, as Andy McCarthy recounts in “The Grand Jihad,” an American Muslim Brothers meeting in Philadelphia in 1991 produced an internal memorandum candidly proclaiming their mission: “Eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house …” Should we really be calling this “legitimate Islamism” — and should we really be comfortable with it?

There are those who predict that the Islamists taking power in Egypt and elsewhere will become pragmatic once they have to pay bills, fill potholes and curry favor with voters. But that has not happened in Iran over the past 33 years, much as we’ve tried, from time to time, to convince ourselves such a transition was at hand. Nor has it happened in Pakistan and Turkey — both have become increasingly Islamized in recent years.

Other scholars, my friend and colleague Reuel Marc Gerecht prominent among them, argue that Islamism should be seen as a way station rather than a destination. They argue that Muslim-majority societies will learn soon enough that it’s not true that “Islam is the answer” to all the vexing questions of economic and societal organization. Once that happens, they predict, a process of liberalization and democratization will commence.

But what is the basis for the belief that the Islamists will allow themselves to be voted out of power? Again, that’s not been possible for Iranians who, ample evidence suggests, long ago became disenchanted with theocracy.

That brings us to the most egregious way in which our thinking has been befogged. In 2009, President Barack Obama visited Fort Hood to honor the 13 Americans massacred by Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army officer who proclaimed himself a “soldier of Allah.” The Americans who had been gunned down, Obama said, “did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great state and the heart of this great American community. This is the fact that makes the tragedy even more painful, even more incomprehensible.”

Such incomprehensibility not only persists, it is being reinforced by official U.S. policy. Last week, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordered all military schools to make sure they were not including “anti-Islamic themes” in training courses. Dempsey’s order prohibits instructors and guest lecturers from “advocating ideas, beliefs and actions that are … disrespectful of the Islamic religion.”

Imagine if, during the 1930s, the U.S. government had prohibited ideas, beliefs and actions that might be seen as disrespectful of the German, Italian or Japanese nations. What if, during the Cold War, there had been a ban against ideas, beliefs and actions that could be seen as disrespectful of Russian culture or of socialism, since most socialists were not “violent extremists”?

To see through the fog of war, Clausewitz wrote, requires “a fine, piercing mind.” He probably took for granted that it also requires intellectual courage, something not often exhibited by Western leaders in the current era.

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.